About this site

The basic idea here is to rescue recipe boxes from estate sales (or anywhere else) and preserve as much of what’s there as possible. The secondary goal is to tag and categorize these recipes to get a better sense of American cooking and its regional variations.

Not to get too metaphysical, but recipe cards are a particular art form all their own. And recipe boxes are cultivated gardens of this art. People would spend their entire lives with the box in the cupboard or even on the counter, sometimes pass it down through their children, and yet, these boxes increasingly are ending up at estate sales. Worse yet, most of the buyers just want the box and throw out the contents.

Recipe boxes from estate sales are orphans and they need and deserve to be loved.

FAQ

Q: Can I submit recipes to Yesterdish?

Absolutely, and I’d love to have the help. Use the form below to contact me so we can talk about it.

A few quick things about submitting to Yesterdish:

If you want to scan the recipes yourself, high-quality color scans of original recipes are required. (By “original,” I mean having their origin in your family’s recipe box–not “a creative work without precedent.”) Remember, the recipes are supposed to be legible in the image, within the bounds of handwriting. Please also transcribe the recipes, if you can.

I may not be able to post everything. Although we don’t typically think of them in this way, copyright law does apply to the contents of recipe boxes. I’m capable of navigating those waters on my end, but I’m not your lawyer and don’t represent you in terms of figuring out those obligations on your end. That said, in order to figure out the copyright status of the recipes, I’m going to need to ask you some basic questions, like “who wrote this,” and “do you have any idea when,” and “did they show anybody else?”

If you don’t have the ability to scan the recipes yourself, we can work something out where you mail the recipes to me and I mail them back, but obviously, that makes me nervous. The mail system is good, but not perfect, after all.

3 Comments

Annie in NOLA has been kind enough to nominate my blog for a Libster Award and now I’m nominating you

There are some rules to being nominated: • Answer the questions you were given by the person who nominated you • Keep the ball rolling and nominate 11 new blogs with 500 followers or less • Post 11 new questions for your nominees to answer • Tag your nominees and be sure to leave a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been nominated.

My questions to you is:
1 Country side or city, what do you prefer?
2 Cats or dogs, what do you prefer?
3 What were your hobbies when you were a kid?
4 Why did you start to blog?
5 Favourite holiday destination?
6 Favourite kind of music?
7 Favourite kind of food?
8 Favourite book of all times?
9 Wine or beer, what do you prefer?
10 Hiking or luxury hotel, what do you prefer?
11 Watching TV or surfing the net, what do you prefer?

If this has no interest for you just forget the whole thing, if it sounds interesting start answering the questions and find 11 blogs you like to nominate